Thomson Reuters Foundation Workshop on Fact-checking for African Elections 2019 (Fully-funded)

Deadline: May 1, 2019

Applications are open for the Thomson Reuters Foundation Workshop on Fact-checking for African Elections 2019. The Thomson Reuters Foundation is partnering with TRI Facts at Africa Check – Africa’s first independent fact-checking organisation – to help African journalists and editors to fact-check their own election coverage.

The programme will provide skills, tools and resources on fact-checking in an African context. It will look at how to develop and integrate evidence-based election coverage into existing newsrooms, and how to make information engaging for an audience that might be fed up with the campaign.

The programme will feature:

• A five-day workshop in Nairobi for journalists and editors, delivered by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and TRI Facts (Africa Check’s training and research division). It will feature practical fact-checking and reporting exercises to equip participants with the skills they need to fact-check political claims during an election campaign, and after elections.
• A mentoring scheme: participants will be invited to submit proposals for stories or projects and a selection will receive one-to-one support from experts at the Thomson Reuters Foundation and TRI Facts. It could be a review of promises made in the previous election, an analysis of how various government departments use facts, or could involve setting up a “promise tracker” to follow up on what politicians say in the next campaign.
• Participants will also receive support on specific fact-checks, for claims that prove difficult to verify.

Cost

• The organizers will cover all transport and subsistence costs of journalists and editors participating in this programme.

Eligibility

• Journalists and editors working for domestic media in African countries with elections coming up in the near- to mid-term (preferably in 2017 or 2018). These include, but are not limited to: Kenya, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Somaliland, Cameroon, Madagascar, Mauritania, and Zimbabwe;
• You can be working in any medium – print, radio, TV, online;
• They are interested to hear from journalists or editors with the ability to change practice in their newsroom – for example by setting up standardised fact-checking processes;
• Applicants must be fluent in English;
• Applicants must have a minimum of one year’s experience. They should either be working full-time for a media organisation, or a freelancer whose main work is journalism.

Application

Click here to apply

For more information, visit Thomson Reuters Foundation Workshop.